The Death of an Irish Sinner (11 page)

Rather perfectly, Bresnahan believed. After the initial torrent of rage and jealousy—when she realized that she still loved Ward deeply and perhaps it might be possible for him to love two women equally and at once—all else became possible.

Now together they had three incomes, all the daycare they could want, intelligent, mature companionship, and much love, since Ward was attentive to the needs of both on that score.

The only quibble with the arrangement that Bresnahan had found was that Ward smiled too much. She had never seen him happier, which had made her wonder if all men were actually repressed bigamists.

And why not, she thought, again sliding off the stool and stepping into Parmalee so their noses were only inches apart. Dublin was a potentially cosmopolitan city with good schools and universities, cultural institutions, and even journals, Parmalee’s tabloid excepted.

Why couldn’t—no, why
shouldn’t
—alternative living situations, based on love and mutual respect and in which children were also loved and cared for, be explored? Certainly the model nuclear family was in serious disarray in much of the world, if statistics could be believed.

And now to have this—what? ex-priest-turned-scandalmonger—not merely poking fun at but also threatening their excellent arrangement enraged Bresnahan. Low, so only Parmalee would hear, she said, “You don’t know me, you don’t know us—”

“Oh, but I do,” he began to say through a thin smile.

“I do. I have touts—”

“No. You. Don’t. And what you don’t know is—you push this thing to the max, we will too. Our way. Count on it. And you won’t like our max, not one bit.”

Parmalee stepped away from her, his smile muting to one of wonder. “I can’t believe it! The bitch is actually threatening me with bodily harm.”

Bresnahan only regarded him.

“Did you hear it?” he asked one man. “Or you? I want you to be my witnesses—just in case this curious person can find the…er,
balls
to act on her threat.”

Some of the others now began laughing.

“Do I say your name now, or will you spare us the burden of your loathsome presence—pistol-packin’ adulteress that you are?

“Now, be off!” Parmalee pointed toward the swing doors.

The laughter was general and sustained as Bresnahan made her way through the pub.

“Ah, c’mon, Dery—tell us her name. D’ya have her number?”

“He’s got that, all right.”

“Great
craque
! The best!”

“No, no—great
rack
. Will you look at the prow on her. Wouldn’t mind a bit of that meself.”

Bresnahan knew it was wrong, but for the first time since having her baby and moving in with Hughie and Lee, she felt different and…unhappy about who she was and how she was living.

Which made her angrier still.

Through much of the afternoon, McGarr and Noreen had waited for Father Juan Carlos Sclavi to complete a “Confidence” with his “spiritual director,” Father Fred Duggan.

“From what Father Sclavi has already revealed to me, you won’t be disappointed,” Duggan said, when offering them lunch in the refectory of Barbastro.

“Truth is, we have some spiritual issues to clear up. Sclavi is a…hugely caring and sensitive human being, and divulging information about somebody, no matter how accurate or important, is most difficult for him. I hope you understand.”

McGarr checked in with his headquarters, wondering if any leads to the whereabouts of Geraldine Breen had turned up. “Not a one,” said John Swords, the desk sergeant on duty. “It’s as if she simply disappeared, and I can’t see how, the way she looked—the busted nose and all.”

McGarr did. She had obviously been hidden by her cohorts in Opus Dei, and he was half tempted to declare her wanted for murder and have a before-and-after artist’s rendering published in the country’s newspapers.

But would she have attacked him in Mary-Jo Stanton’s headquarters had she murdered the woman? Perhaps not. Still, a case could be made that she had attacked him to allow whoever it was who had been tossing the place to escape.

“How many staffers do we have on her?”

“Five, including myself.”

“Add two more. Concentrate on known Opus Dei residences. Try to get inside. Watch for any medical at
tention—physicians, nurses, trips to the chemist. That class of thing.”

Throughout lunch and then later, in a walk around the grounds of the estate, Noreen and McGarr discussed the subject she had broached earlier in the day—faith and religion.

“And you mean to tell me you don’t believe in anything at all?”

“I didn’t say that, exactly.”

“Yes, you did. You said you didn’t see a sign of God anywhere in the universe.”

McGarr looked away at an expanse of sloping lawn that led down to a large pond framed by the twin stands of magnificent, immemorial linden trees that graced the bank.

He remembered how Mary-Jo Stanton once spoke to him, gardener to gardener, of her theory of planting. “I like making vistas at every turn, in a way that will lead the visitor from one picture to another.” They had been walking along this very pathway in spring, like this.

“Of course, this sends people who like great panoramas completely mad,” she had continued. The three islands on the pond—or “lake,” as she had called the maybe forty-acre impoundment—were thickly planted with pampas grass and New Zealand flax “to provide the architectural element” among the waterside plantings. As he remembered, those consisted of candelabra primulas, fair-maids-of-France, lilies, hostas, fox-gloves, and dicentra, which had only just begun to show themselves.

“Well?” Noreen demanded.

McGarr felt his brow furrow. Conversations like this,
which supposed the multiplicity of life could be reduced to simple statements, were difficult for him. Often he considered himself just not clever enough to sum up his feelings, as could Noreen and many of the other people they knew.

Which could be why he had become a policeman, right and wrong being the one concept that he understood thoroughly. “No,” he replied. “I said I see no sign of a god at work anywhere in the universe.”

“Well—where do you think the universe came from? And…
matter
? Us? You and me? And what does life mean? Are we just motes hurtling for an instant through time and space?”

“Well, take you, for instance.” McGarr reached an arm around her shoulder. “I know where you came from. Heaven, surely. But the book’s still out on me.”

“Ah, go ’way now. Don’t patronize me.” She slipped out of his grasp. “I’m really disturbed that you’re insisting on that class of tough-cop agnosticism that you dust off like a party piece whenever I try to speak seriously with you.”

Agnosticism? Was she hoping? “Tell you true”—he managed to take her shoulder again—“this is the only heaven we’ll ever know, you and me here in this garden. And we should enjoy it.”

“You must be joking. Some garden, where a woman who sweated, slaved, and lavished her precious time on this patch of ground could be murdered in it in her eightieth year.”

McGarr let pass the thought that at least she’d had the eighty years, less the day of her death, as gardener
in one of the most beautiful places in the country, if not the world.

“Then do you think Mary-Jo has passed on to a final and eternal reward?” Noreen asked.

“Yes.” Wherever she was, if anywhere, it was surely final and eternal.

“And it’s some place like here in this garden.”

“I would hope.”

“See—you’re just parsing this argument. Will you ever get serious with me? Or do you also take us, our marriage, our child, our lives as lightly as you view metaphysics? If the possibility of God means nothing to you, how can anything else?”

Rather simply, actually, everything else being serious in the extreme. “I hope you know I take you more seriously than any other person, place, or thing in the world,” he said in a low voice into the fine auburn hairs at the nape of her neck. “Because I love you.”

“Well, I
hope
that’ll be enough. For you.”

When his time came, he supposed she meant.

But it was. He was sure.

Around half past three McGarr’s mobile phone rang, and five minutes later Noreen and he arrived at the door of Father Juan Carlos Sclavi’s room. It opened at the first knock.

“Come in,
por favor
.” The dark young man bowed slightly as they stepped into the large room. “I believe you know my spiritual director,” he said in halting English, turning his head to Duggan, who was seated at a desk near one of Barbastro’s tall windows. He was
writing something on a piece of paper that he then folded and slipped into a pocket.

“Director?” Noreen asked. “Does a priest need a spiritual director?”

“Of course,” Duggan put in. “We all need guidance in matters spiritual.”

To ensure orthodoxy? McGarr wondered. In the packet of information he’d been sent, one item said that every Opus Dei member was required to attend a weekly Confidence with a spiritual director. Set topics were discussed, such as personal conduct, and faults in attitude. The “fraternal correction” that could be imposed might take the form of acts of contrition or some other punishment meted out by the spiritual director.

On other occasions, the spiritual director or other Opus Dei higher-ups might visit lesser members in their rooms and remove some personal belonging, like a wristwatch or a jacket, to which a member had become overly attached, “self-abnegation and sacrifice, discipline, and confidence in the strict sense (group secrecy) being the keys to membership control.”

The report had continued: “This is a most secret, reactionary organization that views itself as the successor to the militant traditions of the Knights Templar. Opusians believe that in spreading their interpretation of Christianity, all means justify the ends of countering Communism, Liberation Theology, and radical Islam, and of defeating within the Church ‘liberalizing’ issues such as birth control and women priests. Insubordination is not tolerated.”

Duggan now said, “As I mentioned to you earlier, Chief Superintendent McGarr—Father Sclavi has
something he’d like to tell you. And would you mind terribly if I remained here while you interview him? His English is not perfect, and I believe I have evidence that will corroborate what he’ll say.”

Control again. Not only had Duggan orchestrated what the young priest would say, during the Confidence, now he wished to make sure the lines were delivered according to plan.

As though reading McGarr’s mind, Duggan added, “Yes—we’ve discussed what he will say. But because of the details, which are particular, I think it would be wise to allow me to assist you.”

McGarr shrugged. Why not learn what they had to tell them? He could always interview Sclavi in private later, and at least he’d have the Opus Dei position—forged during the Confidence—on record.

Or was he being entirely too cynical? Perhaps the young man with the dark hair and prominent widow’s peak, the oval face and deep-set eyes, was sincere in what he was about to divulge.

Perhaps McGarr had been prejudiced against faith, religion, and priests because of his early brutal experience with the agents of religion. And more recently by what Dery Parmalee had told him about Opus Dei and what the quick inquiry into the order had partially confirmed.

“Work away,” McGarr said to Duggan.

Sclavi half-bowed again and moved toward Duggan at the window. “I shall now speak?” he asked, turning his head from McGarr to his spiritual director.

Both men nodded.

“So, I was here at this window, looking out some
time after Pater Fred informed me that I should remain in my room. But I look out into the garden and see Miss Stanton, down on the ground where she was digging.

“Then I see a man pick something up from the ground and go into the wood.”

“Do you know who that person was, Juan Carlos?” Duggan asked didactically, his arms folded across his chest, his head cocked to the side.

“I do, Pater. It was the gardener.”

“Francis Mudd.”

Or Manahan. Brother of Delia Manahan. Informer and ex-convict.

McGarr moved to the window and looked out. Certainly he could see into the formal garden where the corpse had been discovered, but it was full daylight. At night, he imagined, the scene would be more difficult to see from the distance of—what?—easily a hundred yards. But then his own eyes were not what they once were.

On the blotter of the desk lay a pair of eyeglasses.

“More to the point, it seems that Father Sclavi’s testimony can be documented,” Duggan said.

McGarr waited.

“It’s on the transcript—the security tapes. After the bit with the jacket being placed over the lens of the camera at the moment that Mary-Jo was being killed.”

“How do you know that?” McGarr had ordered Ward and McKeon to seize the tapes as evidence.

“Oh”—Duggan closed his eyes and shivered his cheeks histrionically—“I neglected to tell you. I consulted my superiors, who inquired of a solicitor, who
advised me to make copies of the tapes before handing them over. Yesterday, the day of the…crime.”

“Why is that?”

“Well, as a simple precaution.”

“Against what?”

“Against the possibility that they might be edited.”

“By the police?” Noreen asked.

Duggan hunched his broad shoulders. “I was ordered to do it. I did it.”

As a good soldier in Christ, thought McGarr. A modern-day Templar.

“But isn’t that a curious attitude for a religious organization—not to trust the police?”

“Of course we trust the police. Implicitly.”

But Noreen would not be put off. Two patches of red had appeared in her cheeks. “Then why make a copy?”

Duggan shook his head. “Perhaps to ease the mind of one of my superiors.”

“And who might he be when he’s at home?”

“I’m afraid I couldn’t say.”

“Yet that unknown—could he be unknowable?—person is orchestrating your actions here?”

Duggan only stared at her, rather balefully, McGarr judged.

“Take us to this tape,” he said.